Two Fronts, One War

Introduction

IF WE DISCARD THE ARGUMENT that the Second World War was actually an extension of the First World War and the revolutions and civil wars of the early twentieth century, then the first European victim of the Second World War was likely an unknown common criminal from one of Adolf Hitler’s concentration camps. On the evening of 31 August 1939, Hitler’s SS dragged him from his cell, forced him to don a Polish soldier’s uniform, shot him, and dumped his body near the radio station in the German frontier town of Gleiwitz as evidence of a Polish attack that justified the German invasion of Poland.

What followed was the most destructive conflict in world history. Cities, nations and continents were razed. Millions of people (estimates vary from 60 to 100 million) perished in the 2,433 days from the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 until VE-Day in May 1945 and Japan’s official surrender on 2 September 1945. Body counts, so enormous as to be humanly uncountable, testify to the detached and impersonal nature of the war. The largest numbers of those slain, whether combatants or civilians, died anonymously, unknown except to those few who might have been waiting for them at home.

Often in our historical preoccupation with numbers and statistics, with grand strategies and the sweep of armies, with the goings-on of generals, politicians and dictators, we neglect to realize that war involves real human beings with individual dreams, ambitions and lives. War, as combat veterans understand, is the story of individuals caught up in and painted against a broader tapestry of overwhelming events.

Two Fronts, One War strives to look at the fronts of the Second World War from a dual viewpoint. First, the Big Picture lays the larger historical foundation: war in Europe or war in Asia and the Pacific; the invasions of North Africa, Italy and France; aerial, armor, and sea campaigns …

What might be called the fronts of the Small Picture zooms down to soldiers, airmen, Marines, and sailors whose blood-and-guts, mud-and-shit energy collectively and individually propelled the war: of bomber pilots shot down over enemy territory; dogfaces fighting to gain a toehold on Normandy; men struggling for survival on the Bataan Death March; tankers pushing through Germany; airmen who flew B-29s over Japan’s mainland …

The Big Picture is about strategies and tactics, decisions and blunders, big defeats and glorious victories. The Little Picture is about incredible feats of heroism and self-sacrifice, devotion to duty, courage, fear, loyalty, and even of great wartime romances …

I interviewed more than two dozen U.S. Second World War veterans for the stories in this work, both from the European fronts and from the fronts of Asia-Pacific in order to provide a complete view of a single war with two main fronts. Most of these stories have never been published before they were related to the author. Together, they provide a true and dramatic account of what the war was really like, from the Big Picture and from the Small Picture, of a horrifyingly cruel period of history that changed the world for ever.

Charles W. Sasser

Chapter 1

Japanese Victories

IN THE HALF-LIGHT OF DAWN on Sunday, 7th December 1941, 396 Japanese bombers, torpedo bombers, dive bombers, and fighters penetrated a light cloud haze 250 miles north of Hawaii and set course for Pearl Harbor. The bomber leader, Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, tuned in on the American FM radio station at Honolulu and switched on his direction finder. The station was playing Big Band dance music, interrupted by a weather report that predicted breaks in the clouds and greater visibility by sunup.

The United States was less than two hours away from war.

Japan had had imperial fancies at least since its annexing of Taiwan in 1895 and Korea in 1910. The catastrophic Great Depression that began in 1929 swept the world and provided an excuse for Japan to embark on a military expansion in Asia that would provide it with much-needed natural resources like oil, iron, tin, rubber, and other commodities and allow it to establish aGreater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere to make the island nation both self-sufficient and a power to be reckoned with.

As Japan’s armies spread out into China and bumped up hard against Russia, Emperor Hirohito’s generals and admirals began to look south to the rich oilfields and minerals in the old empires of the British, French, Dutch, and Americans in southeast Asia and the Pacific islands. Relations with the United States deteriorated as Japan’s great naval power threatened American domination of the Pacific.

In September 1940, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, which confirmed between the three of them that Europe lay within the sphere of a New World Order to be constructed by Hitler and Mussolini while Japan was left free to spread its own influence in eastern Asia. All three countries pledged to come to each other’s aid in the event one was attacked by an outside party not already engaged in the war.

All through 1941, even though Germany had already conquered Poland, Norway, France, the Balkans, and other nations, most Americans felt that the war across the Atlantic affected no vital American interest. In addition to not being prepared psychologically for war, the nation was also not equipped militarily or industrially. Only something major or catastrophic could entice the American public to support anything other thanhelping friends, and only then under conditions short of war.

Japan’s leaders concluded that war across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean would be almost impossible for their political enemies to conduct. Britain was barely hanging on against Hitler in Europe and Africa, and could resist but little in Asia. The Dutch were already beaten. General Hideki Tojo, Japan’s prime minister from mid-October 1941, argued that America didn’t have the will to fight. Besides, it would take months before the Americans were able to float a navy capable of taking on the great Imperial Fleet. By that time, Japan would have carved out its Pacific empire and reinforced its walls.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet, was wary about tugging on the eagle’s tail feathers. He knew America’s economic potential well, having attended Harvard University and served later in Washington as Japanese naval attaché. Only by a devastating surprise attack, he argued, could Japan hope to kick the United States out of the equation.

In the first twelve months of war with the United States and Britain, I will run wild and win victory after victory, he predicted. After that … I have no expectations of success.

Tojo agreed it would have to be a surprise attack, starting with Pearl Harbor. Simultaneous with the treacherous attack against Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces would ambush Siam to score a base of operations against Malaya, Burma, and Singapore; would seize the American islands of Guam and Wake and the British Gilbert Islands to block American sea routes to the Philippines; and, finally, would capture Hong Kong and invade the Philippines.

The plan all depended on the destruction of the American fleet with one mighty blow.

In retrospect, President Franklin Roosevelt and his military commanders, advisors, and intelligence experts should have whiffed the stench of conspiracy in the air. There were certainly sufficient clues to warn them of Japanese intentions. Instead, no effective preparations for defense had been made in Hawaii. Neither Washington nor military commanders at Pearl Harbor were aware of the Japanese task force that set sail under Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo on 18th November 1941 for the 1,000-mile trek to the Kuriles and, continuing from there, another 4,000 miles to a jumping-off point north of Hawaii.

The task force consisted of six aircraft carriers with 396 warplanes, two battleships, two heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, eight destroyers, three tankers, and a supply ship. The only U.S. reconnaissance planes in the area on 7th December were patrolling far to the southwest towards the Marshall Islands.

An hour and a half after the Japanese air armada lifted off from Admiral Nagumo’s carriers, Commander Fuchida spotted the northern tip of Oahu. He reported ten American battleships, a heavy cruiser, ten light cruisers, and several destroyers tied up in port like ducks on a pond.

At 0749, Fuchida transmitted a pre-arranged radio message: Tora! Tora! Tora! (Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!). This code told Nagumo that surprise had been achieved and that the attack was a go.

The first wave of 183 Japanese warplanes buzzed in like giant bees, unleashing flame and black smoke that immediately enveloped most of the harbor. Battlewagon U.S.S. Oklahoma was the first to roll over and sink, trapping more than 400 sailors to die deep within its hull. Battleship Arizona blew up in a massive explosion, killing more than 1,000 men.

Parts of Fuchida’s force peeled off to strike the U.S. Army Air Force bases at Hickam Field, Wheeler Field, and the Naval Air Station at Ford Island. A U.S. Army Catholic chaplain preparing for an open-air Sunday Mass seized a nearby machinegun and, resting it on his altar, was the first man at Hickam Field to fight back.

The second wave of aircraft zoomed in at 0850 hours to mop up. By 0945, the enemy had disappeared as quickly as they appeared. The sky was clear of clouds but now clotted with smoke. Of 394 U.S. aircraft on the island, 347 were either destroyed or damaged. Eight U.S. ships were sunk, including four battleships, while 2,403 servicemen and civilians lost their lives and another 1,143 were wounded. Only the fleet’s three aircraft carriers having been out to sea prevented the devastation from being complete.

The Japanese lost twenty-nine aircraft and pilots.

Even while Pearl Harbor smoldered, President Roosevelt in Washington hurriedly completed the first draft of the Day of Infamy speech he would deliver to Congress and the American people the next day.

* * *

Saving Dorie Miller

MOST OF THE U.S. PACIFIC FLEET was tied up to piers or moored at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the quiet, warm evening of 6th December 1941. The sounds of Battleship Row were soothing and familiar over the calm waters of the harbor—the gentle flapping of halyards and lines, the slow rise and fall of warships against their docks, an occasional All Hands announced from a PA system, laughter and shouts from the docks as sailors in dress whites took off for a night on the town in Honolulu.

Quartermaster Striker Arles Cole, 17, and his buddy, a 21-year-old mess attendant with the unlikely name of Doris Dorie Miller, left the battlewagon U.S.S. West Virginia (BB-48) and went ashore for liberty, joking and scuttle-butting like all young seamen excited about a few hours’ freedom in a foreign port. Miller had met a wahini who had a girlfriend. Enough said.

You smell like a Hong Kong whorehouse, the cook chided his young friend.

What does that smell like?

Miller laughed. You.

Miller should have known. He was an old salt who had sailed the seas since 1939 when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy as a mess attendant. Few other ratings were available at the time for black men. He had pulled a tour aboard the battleship U.S.S. Nevada before transferring to the West Virginia.

At five-nine and 235 pounds, a hundred pounds heavier than Cole, he was dubbed the Raging Bull when he played high school football in Waco, Texas. He had since acquired notoriety as the Fighting Cook, the fleet’s heavyweight boxing champ.

Cole, skinny and white, reported to Pearl Harbor for duty in August 1941. He had grown up poor during the Great Depression on a hardscrabble farm in the community of Starrvilla near the little country town of Porum in eastern Oklahoma, a land and time John Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath. Starrvilla was named after the famous lady outlaw Belle Starr, whose family still lived in the vicinity.

The Great Depression-era bandit, Pretty Boy Floyd—or Purty Boy to the country folk—had continued the OklahomaOwlhoot tradition by supposedly robbing from the rich to give to the poor. Every old barn or shed in eastern Oklahoma carried with it a story of how Pretty Boy once hid in it to eludethe law. When the law finally gunned him down, people came in wagons and old trucks from all over the country to attend his funeral up in Sequoyah County.

Like many Americans, Arles’s folks were immigrants, his mother’s people from Ireland and his dad’s from England. The Irish Nicholsons, his mother’s folks, traveled by covered wagon into Indian Territory from near Springfield, Arkansas, in 1896. Lucy Nicholson was born at a camp just inside Indian Territory.

Albert Cole, whose parents migrated from England and found their way to the Indian Nation, was born that same year. Both families settled on log cabin farms near Porum. Albert Cole and Lucy Nicholson married in 1914 when they were both seventeen.

Albert shipped overseas in 1918 to fight in the First World War. Arles was named after an ancient town in southern France where his dad’s outfit staged preparatory to moving up into combat.

Rural Americans in the 1930s received their news by battery-powered radios, since few country households had electricity. Newscasts blared constantly about how the United States was next if the Germans continued their quest for power. In bursts of patriotism, young men from all over the nation were enlisting in the armed forces. Arles’s older brother ran off and enlisted in the Army in early 1940. Arles joined the Navy on 31st December 1940, only days after his seventeenth birthday, hitchhiking ninety miles to the recruiting station in Tulsa to sign up.

It was late that fateful night when Cole and Miller returned to West Virginia after an evening running the strip of cheap bars and gyp joints that lined the beaches. It was actually Sunday morning, 7th December. Dorie Miller’s wahini arrangement hadn’t worked out, so the two swabs settled for the saloons and strip joints. No one in town paid much attention to legal age when it came to U.S. sailors with money to burn.

Miller straggled below to rack out in crew quarters. Cole crashed in the pilot’s house located in the superstructure above the main deck, which was his normal duty station. Still wearing liberty whites, he looked out over the harbor where ships’ mooring lights dotted the darkness. He dozed off in the captain’s chair.

Neither of the young seamen foresaw the Rising Sun lurking over the horizon. Events were about to transpire that would change their lives for ever.

Cloudy gray dawn seeping through the pilot’s house windows awoke Cole. Stiff from the chair, he yawned, stretched, and poured himself a cup of black coffee from the pot always kept hot by the quartermaster watch.

You look like hell, Cole, the Chief quartermaster said. No more liberty for you, boy, until you’re old enough to change your own diapers.

Cole grinned sheepishly and stepped outside on the open deck to sip his coffee. The water was almost flat and, reflecting the broken cloud cover, as gray as the warships in the half-light. He was standing there, leaning on the rail and contemplating going below for a shower and clean dungarees before chow, when loudspeakers on West Virginia and every other ship in port suddenly began clamoring in unison. Amplified voices thundered and crashed from ship to ship, jolting sailors out of their racks before they were fully awake. Cole’s coffee cup dropped from numbed fingers.

General Quarters! General Quarters! All hands! This is not a drill. Repeat! This is not a drill.

Cole heard it first—a high-pitched buzzing that seemed to come from all over. Like hornets in the nest he and his brother poked out of a tree one day down by the creek. Buzzing became a loud drone, and then the sky seemed to shriek.

Clouds appeared to split open to reveal swarms of apparently hostile aircraft. Rays of pale sunshine illuminated the huge red suns on their fuselages as they screamed in low. Bombers and fighters and all sizes in between. Hundreds of them.

Bombs began exploding, geysering water and metal and fuel and blood. Flickering machinegun fire ripped into sleeping ships. A column of water from a near miss erupted alongside West Virginia and sprayed into the ship’s tall superstructure, drenching Cole. The bay, flat and calm moments before, now churned from the assault.

The reverberating growling of aircraft engines and the jolting thunder of explosions caused mass chaos. West Virginia rolled and seemed to hunch against the impact of bombs and torpedoes. Fires broke out. Black smoke wreathed through damaged warships, oozed among twisted and tangled dockside cranes, and crept into structures riddled with bullet holes and explosions.

West Virginia shuddered mightily as what was later determined to be a torpedo from a Japanese midget submarine penetrated its hull below the waterline, almost knocking Arles Cole off his feet. Sucking smoke into his lungs, coughing, eyes tearing, he fled the pilot’s house and fought his way through the turmoil down to the main deck and then to the nearest hatch where he plunged into the bowels of the vessel. His designated battle station lay four decks below with the chip’s command element in the alternate control nerve center.

He experienced raw terror for the first time in his young life. Bile burnt the back of his throat and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. All around him, running sailors, jarred out of their bunks, many wearing only their skivvies, jammed smoky passageways and ladders as they stampeded to their own GQ battle stations. He glimpsed sailors bleeding or with their hair singed. He heard yelling and screaming. Smoke from burning fuel oil and explosions clotted his nostrils and cut his vision.

Frightened, disoriented, dazed by the suddenness of the attack, it was all he could do to maintain footing. The big battlewagon convulsed with each impact of bomb or torpedo, knocking Cole off balance and slamming him repeatedly off bulkheads and into other sailors. It was like the ship was battling a hurricane at sea. By the time he reached the third deck below, the ship was listing hard to port, taking on water from the torpedo hit suffered at the beginning.

He made his way unsteadily along the center passageway that ran nearly the full length of the warship. Traffic had thinned to only a stray crewmember here and there. The deck was so slanted that he had to walk with his hands pressed against bulkheads in a near-pushup posture. A few more degrees of list and he would actually be walking on the bulkheads. The sound and feeling below decks was like being trapped in a tin can being shaken in the fist of a giant.

She’s going down! a fleeting shadow screamed as it appeared out of the smoke and then disappeared.

Cole willed himself not to panic. Training dictated that he report to his battle station as quickly as possible. On a warship, every man’s life depended on fellow seamen all doing their jobs.

What the young QM striker couldn’t know from his limited perspective was the extent of the damage already inflicted not only upon his ship but also upon the rest of the hapless fleet. U.S.S. Oklahoma had snapped its mooring lines and rolled completely over to stab its masts into the bottom of the bay, drowning many of its crew. The Arizona was also sinking after bombs exploding in its main magazine cooked off ammunition that blew out the battleship’s fantail. Several cruisers and destroyers were coughing up billows of smoke and riding low in the water.

Below decks on West Virginia, lights dimmed and blinked on and off as generators became waterlogged and began to shut down. Seawater gushed through ragged holes torn into the vessel’s hull. Passageways were flooding. Oily saltwater swished around Cole’s ankles, rapidly rising to his knees as he took a ladder deeper to the fourth level below where the alternate control center was located.

Every instinct raged at him to run for his life.

The lights flickered one last gasp, then quit, plunging the depths of the wounded ship into darkness more complete than anything Cole had ever known. Cold water lapping up around his waist froze his insides. The thud of falling bombs and exploding torpedoes shook the vessel with savage persistence and sloshed around the water trapped inside with him.

He had never felt so alone. He cried out against the blackness, but there was no answer. Finally, his survival instincts took over and he sought a way out of the trap he had entered. He began making his way to starboard and away from the heaviest portside flooding, crossing amidships on slanted footing, feeling his way hand by hand in the darkness while water continued to rise.

He found his escape routes blocked; all the watertight doors were dogged, according to drill. Anyone caught below decks was imprisoned in a dark, watery hell. As his desperation grew, his thoughts turned to home.

His mother always concluded her letters to him with, Arles, your dad and I are praying for you.

If he ever needed prayer, it was now.

He was beginning to think all was lost when, suddenly, the ship bucked underneath him as a bomb slammed into the main deck above, followed by subsequent convulsions as the heavy unexploded missile pierced down through other decks. A single, amazing beam of light shafted down into the darkness following the bomb’s progress, creating a smoky, cathedral-like effect.

The miracle was that the bomb failed to explode when it splashed mightily into the passageway only a few steps from where the terrified sailor cowered. The impact knocked him off his feet. He came up spluttering and froze, staring, waiting to die in a brilliant cone of light when the bomb went off.

It took him another moment or so, standing there waist-deep in water, the shaft of sunlight beaming down on him, before he realized the bomb really was a dud.

A petty officer named Bill White, one of several crawling around inside the West Virginia searching for survivors, appeared in the bomb opening in the slant above Cole’s head. Spotting Cole, he called out, This way. There’s a way out.

With his help, Cole crawled up and out through the bomb opening and into the drier passageway above. White directed the Oklahoman sailor toward an escape route while he turned down another passageway to look for other survivors.

The sinking ship was beginning to level out as water flooding through the fractured hull distributed itself more evenly in the interior. The darkness was not so complete now. Watertight doors in the upper levels had not been dogged and some of them were open.

As Cole crept his perilous way toward topside and the roar and clamor of the ongoing Japanese attack, he came across a body blocking his exit at the base of a gangway. Light pouring down through the hatch above flushed into the face of his buddy, Dorie Miller. He looked dead.

Grief-stricken, Cole dropped to his knees. After the first shock of discovery, he realized the black cook was only knocked unconscious. Cole shook him, but the cook remained unresponsive. They couldn’t stay here. The ship was sinking.

Arles’s dad always said you could do lots of things you didn’t think you could do when you knew you had to do them. Cole remembered how a skinny little runt back in Porum had lifted a 1940 Chevrolet off his brother-in-law in a spurt of raw adrenaline and determination after a car jack collapsed the vehicle on him.

Papa had better be right.

The little QM striker hoisted Miller’s weight across his shoulders in a feat of strength that might have been impossible under less stressful circumstances. Thus burdened, staggering under the load, he labored topside to the main deck. Japanese warplanes skimming above the masts of stricken ships were still strafing and bombing when, exhausted from the effort, Cole gently deposited his big buddy at a casualty collection point where medical corpsmen were triaging a large number of wounded and injured crewmen.

Thanks, Papa.

Follow-up

Later, Arles Cole learned how Miller had been collecting dirty laundry from the officers’ quarters when the GQ alarm went off. An exploding torpedo knocked him off his feet, causing him to strike his head against the steel gangway as he was bolting topside to his battle station in one of the antiaircraft battery magazines.

As Miller revived after Cole carried him topside, a lieutenant running by recruited him to help rescue Captain Mervyn Bannion from the ship’s bridge where he still held command in spite of serious wounds. The two men dodged through machinegun fire and explosions to reach their captain, who still refused to leave. In fact, he remained at the helm to direct his sinking ship’s depleted defenses until he bled to death.

Although Dorie Miller was only a cook and had had no formal training in operating a machinegun, his battle station in an ammo magazine had allowed him to watch how antiaircraft machineguns were fired. After leaving Captain Bannion on the bridge, he came across an unattended Browning 50-caliber AA position. Enraged at the Japanese sneak attack, he latched on to the trigger of the 50-cal and opened up. He remained at the gun and kept up